Larger Than Lyfe (10 page)

“Yeah, you’re right, black,” Jason said, grabbing his duffle bag
and keys. “Hey, I’m sorry. Just…be careful. Keep that third eye open.”

“Always,” Mars said, giving his best friend a brotherly “pound” in that cool way that Black men do.

They said their goodbyes in the parking lot and went their separate ways. Mars had no plans for the day and was headed back to his condo. Jason was headed to a lunch date with his beautiful, pregnant wife.

Mars slid behind the wheel of his Mercedes and picked up the phone to check his voicemail messages at home. There were several, business-related calls, a message from the housekeeper about his dry cleaning, and a final message from Portia Foster.

“Hi, sweetheart. I’m back in town. I’ve got a bottle of Perrier Jouët, some food from our favorite, little spot, a purse full of condoms, and I’m coming your way. I hope eight o’clock is okay. Bye.”

Mars shook his head as he hung up and pulled out of the parking lot into the busy, Saturday afternoon traffic. He was growing increasingly annoyed by the presumptuous way that Portia conducted herself with him. She acted as if the two of them were involved in an exclusive relationship. It was high time that he removed any possibility of confusion about what the two of them really were to each other. He needed to establish some easy-to-comprehend parameters in regard to their dealings immediately.

At 8:15 that evening, Mars’s doorbell rang. Portia Foster had arrived.

“Hi, sweetie,” she said, planting a kiss on Mars’s
lips and breezing
into his apartment on a cloud of Christian LaCroix perfume.

Portia Foster had a very strong resemblance to the model and actress, Kenya Moore. She was thirty-two years old with deep, flawless, mahogany skin, smoky, bedroom eyes, beautiful, jet black hair that usually cascaded down her back in huge curls and she currently wore in a short, funky, pixie-type cut, and legs that went on for days and days.

She was six feet tall, yet possessed an affinity for four-inch heels. She’d been a runway model for Yves Saint Laurent and Emanuel Ungaro in Paris and Milan prior to establishing a successful interior design firm in Beverly Hills. Mars and Portia had been seeing each other off and on for nearly two years since meeting at a book signing for Tavis Smiley at the Beverly Center.

“So, where’ve you been for the past couple weeks?” Mars asked.

“I went to Ghana to pick up and purchase some art work from my contacts there.” Portia grinned. “It was beautiful. The people are beautiful. We have to go there together. What? Did you miss me?”

“Yeah… somethin’ like that,” Mars said, smacking her on the butt.

She set the food on the living room’s huge, abstract-shaped, cracked-glass table and went out to the kitchen to get plates and silverware and flutes for the champagne she’d brought. Mars turned on
SportsCenter
and steeled himself for the evening ahead.

Portia returned to the living room, kicked off her Gucci heels, went over to the stereo, perused Mars’s carefully organized CD collection, and put on Miles Davis’s
Bitches Brew
. Mars looked at her back as if she was losing her mind.

“Portia,” he said, “I’m watching the highlights of the game.”

“Yeah, yeah, sweetie,” Portia said quickly, turning down the volume on the television set, “and those highlights will be on at
least three more times before the weekend is over. How can you possibly say no to Miles?”

She turned up the stereo volume, lit some freesia incense, and poured Mars a glass of champagne. Then she hiked up her skirt, sat down Indian-style on the floor at the cocktail table, and commenced to roll a joint from the ounce of premium, Indonesian marijuana she pulled from her purse.

“I brought you something back from my trip,” Portia said.

“Oh, yeah? Where is it?” Mars asked, his attention never leaving the basketball highlights.

“It’s a piece for your bedroom. You can pick it up from the gallery sometime next week or have the housekeeper or your secretary arrange to pick it up.”

“Thanks,” Mars said absently.

He gulped down his champagne, and then poured himself another. Portia took a deep drag on her joint, and then passed it up to Mars. He hit it and passed it back to her. He served himself a dish of the steamed broccoli and pan-fried dumplings she’d brought and dipped one of the dumplings into the spicy, Szechuan sauce. Portia put her head back on Mars’s knee and vibed to Miles Davis’s horn and the intricate rhythms of
Bitches Brew
. Mars popped a bit of dumpling into her mouth and she smiled at him as she started to get herself completely faded on the thick, pungent smoke of her joint and the exp
ensive champagne.

“How’s work?” she asked.

“Fine,” Mars responded.

“You really should go ahead, take that leap of faith, and start your own firm,” Portia said. “You’ve talked about entertainment management and legal representation for too long. It’s time to put your plans into action.”

“Not yet,” Mars said. “I’m still doing some fine-tuning.”

Mars finished eating and poured himself a
third glass of champagne.
He had no idea why he was downing so much of the bubbly liquid so fast. Perhaps, subconsciously, his drinking was an escape tactic. He couldn’t be held totally accountable for whatever happened that night if he was drunk.

He knew that he should initiate dialogue with Portia as soon as possible that established some parameters between them. He had serious intentions of pursuing a relationship with Keshari Mitchell, despite the way that she had run out of his apartment, and he did not need Portia to be functioning on any mixed messages nor continuing to show up at his home uninvited. But, knowing Portia’s typical mode of operation on her surprise visits on nights like this one, the totally male part of him, his little head doing all of the thinking while his big head took a lunch, would not allo
w the logical, rational side of him to speak, to clear the air once and for all.

The next thing Mars knew, Portia was tugging down his Sean John sweats and Calvin Klein underwear. She took his manhood into her mouth before he could utter a single word. The only sound that he could muster was a deep groan. She caressed and teased his male part with her tongue until he was as hard as solid rock. He reached for her and she stood up, shedding expensive, designer garments like leaves from a tree in fall.

Her body was the perfection of an African goddess and she was not very big on foreplay. She straddled Mars as he sat there with his sweatpants around his ankles. She took him inside her in one, smooth glide and began to rock slowly back and forth, up and down with the expert precision of a woman who knew exactly which buttons of his to push.

Mars worked his hips to thrust himself deeper into her. He squeezed her perfect, round ass and guided her up and down on his male part aggressively. She pulled Mars’s face into her ample breasts and he took an erect nipple hungrily into his mouth.

“Fuck me like you mean it, sweetie,” Portia moaned.

Mars was more than happy to oblige. He maneuvered the two of them onto the floor and, with Portia on her knees, took her from behind doggystyle in deep, shuddering thrusts that she loved.

The intensity of their lovemaking quickly built to a crescendo. Portia dug her manicured nails into the plush, gray carpet as she screamed out in ecstasy and Mars gave her what she’d come for faster and faster. He shuddered deeply as he climaxed and collapsed onto Portia’s back. Portia smiled at him as she got up and went to the bathroom.

The unbelievable sex was the one thing that kept Portia Foster in Mars’s life. Sexually, the girl had mad skills. She was as uninhibited as they come and she turned him out every time that they connected.

He went into his bathroom and watched her as she soaped herself with his loofah from her breasts to her ankles in his shower. Watching her bathe was a sensual event in and of itself. He stepped into the large, glass compartment with her and took her again, her back pinned against the black-tiled shower wall, her legs in a vise-like grip around his waist.

When they made love a final time in the wee hours of the morning in Mars’s huge bed, the face that Mars saw in place of Portia’s was Keshari’s. As he fell asleep with Portia lying contentedly asleep beside him, vivid dreams of Keshari drifted about in his mind.

“What the FUCK is the matter with you?!” Keshari yelled. “What the fuck would make you do something like that?!”

“Ma’am, I am going to have to ask you to quiet down or I’ll have to ask you to leave,” the sheriff’s officer standing guard across the room advised Keshari.

She nodded in acknowledgment without looking back at him and lowered her voice to an embittered whisper. She was positively livid and couldn’t even contain her fury when she arrived at Men’s Central Jail to see Ricky that morning.

“You know, that was some hot-headed, immature, patently dumb shit that the junior gangsters on the street corners do. I would think that, after all these years, you would be a lot more evolved than this brand of shit. That IS what you’ve always upheld, that The Consortium is composed of the ‘thinking man’s’ gangster.”

All four of Keshari’s tires had been slashed and the body of the Range Rover from the hood to side panels to the rear had been very badly damaged with something that had to have been like a power drill. The gas tank had been filled to overflowing with some sort of a sugary substance. Keshari had had to call a tow truck and a car. She sat, fuming, inside the vandalized Range Rover and waited nearly an hour for it to be picked up before her chauffeured car dropped her at home. She wasn’t about to go back up to Mars’s apartment and have to reveal to him what had happened.

Despite the many heinous acts of extortion
, revenge and intimidation
that Keshari had seen in action over the years, it never ceased to dumbfound her the kinds of things that Ricky and those he employed could pull off and get away with. The maneuver implemented was one that The Consortium had used many times. The vandal had been a police officer from the local precinct who’d “come to respond to a resident’s call” for which the security office, who typically handled calls pertaining to residential problems prior to involving the police, would have no record. The officer was, undoubtedly, on The Consortium’s payroll, had received instructions, some
promise of monetary compensation, and had done the damage himself. He’d left the premises after carrying out his mission without a moment’s suspicion because he was operating under the color of law.

“To protect and serve” was nothing more than a farce. Police officers, in growing numbers, were mainly in the service of usurping their authority and corruptly lining their own pockets. The Consortium had so many police officers regularly in its employ that it would make the Los Angeles Rampart scandal look like a typical day of the secretary making off from work with a purse full of the business’s
office supplies.

The security guards at the gated entrance of the condo community didn’t question a thing when Keshari told them that she was having car trouble. They provided courteous access to her tow truck and her chauffeured car, notated in their logs the resident that Keshari had been visiting, and then bid her a good evening.

All night long, Keshari tossed and turned in anger until she finally gave up on sleep and sat in the solarium on a slow fume with her two Rottweilers at her side, barely able to wait until visitation hours commenced at the jail so that she could confront the sadistic asshole who’d orchestrated what had happened. She asked herself over and over again how she had ever been in love
with him. She’d now received two warnings. Most people in her line of work were never as lucky. She knew that there would not be a third.

“So, what’s next, Ricky?” Keshari snapped venomously. “You gonna order a hit on me?”

Thus far, Ricky had not responded. He’d sat quietly and allowed her to vent.

“That’s a funny question,” he responded. “What do you think?”

“It was a rhetorical question,” Keshari said.

“Of course, it was. You really, really, really have allowed the history of our personal relationship make you forget what the hell you’re fucking with, what the fuck you’re involved in. This is not just about me. And now you’ve gone and gotten some square-assed, pretty boy caught up in your shit. Are you losing your mind?!”